The Fogelman College of Business and Economics recently submitted its first progress report to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the accrediting institution for business schools.
Last spring, the AACSB evaluated the business college as part of the re-accreditation process that occurs every 10 years.
The evaluation team has since requested that the college address a number of internal concerning issues before it would approve re-accreditation.
The business college has three years to address and resolve the problems or face losing accreditation.
The evaluation team’s decision to delay accreditation partially stemmed from the college’s apparent reliance on adjunct professors, lack of technology and the need to restructure its overall goals listed in its mission statement.
The AACSB requires an annual progress report from colleges placed on continuing review, as Fogelman was last spring.
During this re-accreditation process, two AACSB mentors have been assigned to guide the college toward accreditation renewal.
Lewis Mandell, a AACSB business mentor for Fogelman, said he is pleased with the college’s progress.
“To some extent I would say I was amazed at the amount of work that the school got done over the summer when it’s very difficult to convene faculty to get anything done,” Mandell said. “My role in this has been really to be a coach, to attempt to interpret what it is that the AACSB wants from the school and to try to work with the school to ensure that they’re accomplishing what the AACSB wants.”
The progress report was completed and submitted to the AACSB on Sept. 27, earlier than the Oct. 1 deadline, according to Fogelman dean John Pepin.
The report consists of a 13-page executive summary as well as reports from each of the 14 faculty committees that were created in response to the AACSB order.
According to Mandell, an AACSB committee will review the report most likely at the next meeting in December, and make a recommendation.
The recommendation will most likely be one of three possibilities, Mandell said.
Generally, the committee recommends to keep the college on continuing review, with the required annual progress reports.
Another possibility, Mandell said, is that the committee could recommend scheduling a short visit to the college, after which the visitation team could recommend continued review or re-accreditation right away.
“There’s often a third option, that the school be re-accredited with a report,” Mandell said. “The report would be a follow-up to make sure that those actions that were still hanging, in other words things that were promised in the report but that cannot yet be actually done, get done.”
Clay Singleton, another mentor, said that he doubts any action will be taken at this early stage.
“They have three years to correct the situation that the (re-accreditation) team found,” Singleton said. “I would expect that they would use most if not all of those years if for no other reason than to demonstrate that the changes they’ve made are stable and long-lasting.”
Pepin said that the faculty is focused on accomplishing AACSB accreditation reaffirmation in two years instead of three.
“We’re really using the AACSB as a benchmark of continuing improvement for the college, and we want to go beyond the AACSB,” Pepin said.
